Bottle Rock 2013

"Enjoy your bottles and your rocks" 

    - Security Lady who patted me down.

This is me very excited to have a music festival come to my town!  It was a five day affair (Wednesday through Sunday) but I only attended Friday.  I bought my ticket months in advance (like a sucker) but if you procrastinated until the week before the event, there were awesome 50% Off deals.  Oh well, lesson learned for next year.  Procrastination for the win.

 It was a big deal to Napa because the expected crowds made everyone nervous.  I was surprised by a  few of my friends who I thought would be into the festival say they were going to "avoid it like the plague" because "it's going to be a nightmare/shit show".  I was curious how the parking situation was going to play out but I shared none of my friend's feelings.

 

This was one of the adorable ways the event tried to fuse music and wine.

All the restaurants in Napa showed up which meant the food was delicious and crazy mad crazy expensive.

 

Beautiful eating area away from the stages.

These wine pouches were one of my favorite things at Bottle Rock.  I didn't pay $15 for one, but I'm a HUGE fan of alternative packaging.  I need to talk to someone about how to get my wine into these pouches.

No glass, no cork, no foil, label built in.  What's not to love?

  There were 3 stages, this one being the biggest.


The weather was pretty darn perfect.

 I found fellow fun-sunglasses-lover Chelsea soon after arriving.  Do I really look that small in real life?  In my head I am a normal size person.  To be fair, Chelsea is also very tall.

 The other component of the music festival was comedy.  I saw Sarah Tiana and Natasha Leggero, both very funny ladies.  I missed the other two comics I wanted to see because the theater was full.  I think they really underestimated how many people would want to go.

 After the funny ladies, went to see one of my bucket-list artists: Andrew Bird.  I was a little ambivalent about the festival until I saw that Andrew Bird was playing.  I would have been happy to go home after seeing him.

 The lyrics, the violin, the whistling, the pedal looping; such a pleasure.

 A few hours later, on a different stage we waited for The Black Keys.  This time I was a little further away from the stage.

 But I was still in front of all these people.  Later I read that attendance on Friday was 30,000 people.

 I cringe at the quality of night pictures on the iphone, but what can you do? What's that you say - buy a real camera? Nonsense.

 The Black Keys were a fireball of energy and awesomeness.  Overall I think the day and the festival as a whole was a success and hope they can get their act together and do it again next year.

-L

Healdsburg Visit

I made a resolution this year to visit two new wineries a month.  So far I've failed to keep it up, but I have made it to a few.  And these two wineries were in Healdsburg, not Napa, so I think that should give me at least double points. 

Quivira was a recommended stop.  I was interested in visiting this winery because they make a Grenache.  This is the wine I wanted to make (but couldn't find last year) so I made Barbera instead.  The wine here was tasty and refueled my ambition to try to find some Grenache.

Next stop was Williams Selyem.  Fantastic pinot.  I had seen pictures of the beautiful architecture in a magazine and really wanted to visit the winery.

The stacked barrels by the window were only a display.  That much direct sunlight is a winemakers nightmare.

The building and it's surrounding were truly impressive.  But I was disappointed to learn that this building was mainly a storage facility.  The wine is made elsewhere.

So I enjoyed the beautiful scenery instead.

There was a gigantic stone pad on the back side of the building.  I'm curious what they use it for since it's not a crush pad.

On another note . . . .

Today is my Friday and I am very excited for this weekend.  Napa is hosting a very epic (for Napa) music festival called Bottle Rock.  It started today and goes till Sunday.  A 4-day pass was a little out of my budget but I will be going for one of the days. I will report back on how bad the traffic was, how hot it got and mostly likely a few stories of dumb things tourists did. 

So excited! YAY!

-L

P.S. Anyone else going?

How it's Made: Wine Bottles

Last week I felt like I was on an episode of How It's Made.  Two coworkers and I went to Tracy, California to a glass plant to better understand that side of packaging.  Safety first!  Hard hat, eye and ear protection and a sweet vest.  Susan (Production Coordination) and I were very excited to be there.

The first thing you notice is the heat.  There are 4 giant furnaces working all day every day to melt the components to make glass.  It may look like this picture has a filter, but this is pretty close to the colors in the plant.  It's upwards of 90F in there, they said sometimes in the summer for a few days it has gotten up to 135F.  They have to take frequent breaks to combat heat exhaustion.

They let us go up to look into the furnace.  You can see the tiny round yellow hole in the picture.  It's what it must be like to look at the surface of the sun, undulating waves of molten glass lava.  You can't look at it directly, they gave us a filter to look through.  When I got up there it was so hot I think I singed my nose hairs.  For about 2 seconds I felt like the air was taken out of my lungs and then I felt a strong tingling sensation in my nose like severe allergies.  Totally worth it.  

This part is the mixing chamber.  I think.  It was so loud and very difficult to hear the explanations sometimes.  Anyway, some sort of mixing happens here.

This picture did not turn out well.  But what I was trying to illustrate (besides my stylish footware - they made me wear giant man shoes because my shoes were not appropriate) was how everywhere you walked the floor was covered with shards of glass.  There is just too much to ever clean up, so no one does.

The furnaces give off the most heat, but the freshly molded bottles (like the ones here) give off a lot of heat as they travel through the factory. 

 In this picture he is taking two bottles from the line that touched and were fused together.  He picks them up and sends them to be re melted and formed again.  In the video you see him demonstrating how malleable the molten glass is at this stage.

This machine preforms the QC by using lasers to examine the bottles for any defects.  They spin around and a computer searches for any bubbles, blisters, chips, cracks, stones, glass thickness and roundness.

Here is a conveyor of glass that has been approved and is on it's way to be packaged in cartons and pallets.

Between the walls is cullet.  Cullet is what they call recycled glass.  It has to be ground up before it can go back to the furnace to be melted and made into new glass.

I was so excited I got to take pictures this time.  Last year's visit to a different glass plant was mostly pictures of my view from the plane, what I had for lunch and an airport picture of me with Seattle swag for proof.

I still have more Portugal pictures to write about, but this was a nice break.

-L

Forest Visit - Boiling Cork

The second day in Lisbon we drove east to the forests where the raw material is harvested and seasoned.  These are messy piles of raw material.

The bottom of the tree has the highest incidence of TCA.  It's generally wetter and more hospitable to fungal growth.  However, it is not possible to leave this part on the tree and only harvest the top, so the entire portion is harvested and later workers cut the "foot" off the bark (the bottom 9 inches).

 After the "foot" is cut off (seen here) the bark is quickly sorted into "thin", "medium" or "thick".  The sorted piles are then stacked neatly.


Here thick and thin pieces are all piled together, not yet sorted.

This pile is bark of similar thickness.  These piles are left outside for a minimum of 6 months to "season".  This time allows the bark to equilibrate and get more uniform humidity.   

The piles must be left outside, unfortunately it rains and high moisture is an ideal condition for additional fungal growth, so they slope the top in an effort to drain some of the rain water that the wood collects. 

 When they are ready to process the bark they bring the piles inside to be boiled.  The boiling process kills the fungus that is present. This also allows the bark to expand, becoming more pliable and easier to work with.  In this picture the wood has just come out of the boiler and is still steaming.  They do a first boil for 90 minutes at 100C and then a second boil for 45 minutes. 

After the planks are boiled another person cuts them into more workable pieces.  He is also deciding where to cut the pieces; cutting off an ugly chunk can increase the overall quality of a plank.  The prettier the piece, the higher quality cork that can be punched from it.  The rejected pieces are used for shoes and other cork products.

 Here are the boiled flat planks.

More boiled planks that will soon become cork stoppers.  

These are not cork tombstones (although I thought they looked like a cork cemetery).

The top piece is raw bark taken directly from the tree.  The bottom piece is a sample after the raw bark from that tree has been boiled.  They use this to compare how the bark expands and contracts during the boiling process, since no two trees are alike.

This gives them a reference for thickness.  Cork can be harvested every 9 years but if the bark doesn't expand very much when boiled, they might wait more than 9 years to harvest to get the required thickness (sample 22 expanded more than 23). Or they can use the wood for discs instead of corks because discs are thinner.

Now you know more than you thought you could know about knowing what you did not know. 

Next week I'll talk about how the corks get punched and visit a factory where they make champagne corks!

-L

Lisbon, Portugal

Myself and 4 other wine people flew from SFO to New Jersey to Lisbon earlier this month.  The trip was sponsored by our cork supplier to educate us about the cork we are purchasing.  We left Saturday morning and arrived in Lisbon Sunday morning at 9am.  Even though we were all tired, we began sightseeing in Lisbon.  This gorgeous piece of architecture is The Jeronimos Monastery.

I appreciate that the trip planners didn't have us go straight to the cork forest or the factories on the first day.  My mental abilities after flying all night were very poor.  Looking at pretty buildings was about all I could handle.  It's funny because the flight from New Jersey to Portugal is only 6 hours, but it's an international flight so they have to feed you.  We boarded the plane, two hours later they served dinner, then turned the cabin lights off for 3 hours and then woke everyone to feed us breakfast before landing.

It looks like a normal size door for me!  I guess most Portuguese people are short.  My fellow traveler Matt shows that it is in fact a tiny door.

 Next we went to the Belem Tower.  Very beautiful fortress, with cannons!  There is a tiny spiral staircase, not recommended for claustrophobics.   The same staircase is used for going up and down at the same time, I don't recommend it.

 But if you do make it to the top, you get to see this view.  And the bridge, looks just like the golden gate bridge, it's red and  everything.

To me this looks like San Francisco was photoshopped out.  And they put the giant Jesus statue from Rio De Janeiro there instead. 

 And then it was lunch time.  The Portuguese really impressed me with their hospitality and appetites. But I had a hard time with the schedule,  I like to eat dinner at 6pm and be in bed by 9pm.  Here we didn't start eating 'til 9pm and didn't get back to the hotel until after midnight.  The first few nights I wanted to fall asleep in my fish.

What cracked me up is that even though to me we were eating absurdly late, we were ALWAYS the first ones at every restaurant we went to.  This must have been the first among many give aways that we were an American group.

I was expecting to eat a lot of fish in Portugal but I was not expecting barnacles.  They look like sloth claws.  They didn't taste much better either.  But I can cross "eating barnacles" off the bucket list.

The following day, Monday, we drove to the forest.

 They harvest the raw material from May to late August, so we didn't get to see anything being harvested from the tree.  We did see the piles and piles of raw material.

 After the cork is harvested, they pile it up to "season" for a minimum of 6 months.  They leave it exposed to the elements, mainly to get the humidity levels to equilibrate.  

Then they boil the planks (to get them flat and workable), sort the pieces by size and ship it to the north to be punched.

More on boiling next week!

-L